Winners of Alan Alda's 'What is color?' challenge announced

The video winner, an outreach coordinator in the physics department at the University of California, San Diego, won due to her playful but respectful approach to teaching kids.

By: Megan Gannon, LiveScience

June 3, 2014, 10:25 a.m.

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Alan Alda on stage with children at the World Science Festival on June 1 to explain color. (Photo: World Science Festival)

NEW YORK — Most people likely think they know what color is, but they should try explaining the concept to an 11-year-old. Even scientists have a hard time.

Last year, as part of his annual Flame Challenge, actor-turned-science-advocate Alan Alda invited scientists to come up with accurate, vivid answers to the deceptively simple question, "What is color?" On Sunday, June 1, Alda announced the winners here at the World Science Festival during an event that explored what color is (and isn't) made of, how the brain perceives it and how some individuals can even "see" it in music and smells.

The prize in the video category went to Dianna Cowern, an outreach coordinator in the physics department at the University of California, San Diego who runs a YouTube channel under the name Physics Girl. In her less-than-4-minute clip, Cowern wears costumes and interacts with animations, asking her viewers to imagine themselves as color to bring them on a journey from a wavelength of light to a reflection to a brain signal to a perception.

Alda, a founding member of the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University, praised Cowern for respecting the knowledge of her audience while still being playful.

"It was humorous and joyous, but it didn't disrespect the kids, and I love that," Alda told her.

Melanie Golob, a science communicator who works for a company called Doctor Evidence, took home the flame-shaped trophy for the written category for the explanation of color.

"Color itself isn't a thing we can touch, like a pencil or book; color is how our eyes interpret reflection of light off of certain objects," read part of Golob's entry. "That's why we don't see colors in the dark; there's no light to reflect."

Alda, who is most famous for portraying Hawkeye Pierce on "M*A*S*H," kicked off the evening with a familiar tale. As a curious 11-year-old pondering the nature of fire, Alda asked his science teacher, "What's a flame?" and was unsatisfied by her answer: "It's oxidation."

"I didn't know any more about than I did before," Alda said. "It's just like calling it by another name. It's [as if] I said, 'What's a flame?' and she said, 'Oh, that's Fred.'"

At Sunday's event, as the World Science Festival was drawing to a close, Alda invited scientists, artists, children and even a synesthete (someone who experiences blended senses) on stage to help explain color.

To demonstrate that what people perceive as color is something that happens in the brain, and not an inherent characteristic of an object, Jay Neitz, an ophthalmology professor and color vision researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, had seven kids line up. Each child wore a shirt representing a hue of the rainbow. [Your Color Red Could Be My Color Blue]

"When we look at something and we see a color, it's easy to imagine that that color is actually a property of the object we're looking at, but it's not," Neitz said. "Color is a property of the light that's falling on the object and, even more important, our brain's reaction to the light that's reflected in our eyes."

The stage lights dimmed, and a sodium lamp producing just a single yellow-light wavelength bounced off the kids' shirts — no longer a rainbow but an array of dull yellows. Neitz then used a "magic wand" (a white light flashlight) to restore the red, green, indigo and other colors.

Feeling color?

When some people say they can hear or smell color, they aren't being poetic; rather, they're having a genuine perceptual experience known as synesthesia. David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, spoke about how some people can experience color this way.

Eagleman said synesthesia has proved beneficial for artists like Wassily Kandinsky and David Hockney, as well as memory champions, like one man who memorized 30,000 digits of the never-ending mathematical constant pi.

"For him, not only does each digit of pi have a color, but it has a texture, a gender, a shape and a personality," Eagleman said. "And so for him, there's this whole story landscape that's going on, and he's able to memorize pi out to very large numbers."

Kaitlyn Hova, a violinist and synesthete, helped demonstrate how scientists can "test" people for synesthesia by using a tool called Synesthesia Battery, which was developed by Eagleman's lab. With a projection of flashing colors that accompanied a song on the electric violin, Hova also showed the crowd what she sees when she plays music: Hitting a G note, for example, triggered a splash of green.